It's not a coincidence, Clojure was a big influence on Elixir... I think actually it's a bit of a funny parallel with Ruby, I know Matz has said the biggest in

It's not a coincidence, Clojure was a big influence on Elixir... I think actually it's a bit of a funny parallel with Ruby, I know Matz has said the biggest influences on Ruby were Smalltalk, Lisp (or eLisp via Emacs) and Perl, and Elixir has a similar relation to Ruby, Clojure and Erlang (I think Jose has talked about this somewhere also).